DogBytesMan
New Member
Hoping someone can answer these questions....thank you in advance!
We moved to an old house just recently. I've done enough research here to get the picture that our Federal Pacific breaker box has to go. And it will....we are remodeling and adding onto the home, so we're going to have the electrical completely redone (box and everything) in about 6 to 9 months. For now, I am just trying to keep the necessaries going, and I am stuck on our new stove.
The stove requires a 40amp double breaker. I was lucky enough to buy an entire FP breaker box for sale on Craigslist for a good price, and it was filled with breakers. However some of the breakers fit in my box but others do not. The only 40amp double breaker that was in the box I bought does not fit into my box.
Here is a pic of the labels for my box:
The box I bought on Craigslist is identical to mine. The only difference is there's some sort of removable "tabs" (I call them tabs because not sure what their actual name is) that are missing from the box I bought. Here's a pic of my box and the arrow points to the "tab" -- if you look closely you can see it is scratched from me trying to insert the breaker -- as far as I can tell, my box has all the "tabs" still in place:
Here is a pic of the box I bought, the arrow showing where the "tab" is gone. Almost all the "tabs" on the left side are gone:
Here is a pic of the 40amp double breaker -- the arrow shows that it has some sort of protrusion on the bottom of each side -- this protrusion prevents these breakers from fitting into the box unless the "tabs" are removed:
But here is a pic of a 50amp double breaker from the box I bought that does NOT have the protrusions:
So, my questions are:
Why does my box still have tabs while the other box is missing many?
Is there some major difference between the breakers with the protrusions and those without?
Is there some reason I cannot remove "tabs" from my breaker box?
I feel confident installing breakers but I do not like to take chances with electricity. My gut tells me it's probably just fine to remove a couple of tabs and plug in the breakers, but my head has alarm bells going off -- so I humbly request help from you experts out there. Everything else with the breaker box and the electrical system at our place is going fine, but I just want to provide my family with a stove.
Thank you for any responses!
Brad
We moved to an old house just recently. I've done enough research here to get the picture that our Federal Pacific breaker box has to go. And it will....we are remodeling and adding onto the home, so we're going to have the electrical completely redone (box and everything) in about 6 to 9 months. For now, I am just trying to keep the necessaries going, and I am stuck on our new stove.
The stove requires a 40amp double breaker. I was lucky enough to buy an entire FP breaker box for sale on Craigslist for a good price, and it was filled with breakers. However some of the breakers fit in my box but others do not. The only 40amp double breaker that was in the box I bought does not fit into my box.
Here is a pic of the labels for my box:
The box I bought on Craigslist is identical to mine. The only difference is there's some sort of removable "tabs" (I call them tabs because not sure what their actual name is) that are missing from the box I bought. Here's a pic of my box and the arrow points to the "tab" -- if you look closely you can see it is scratched from me trying to insert the breaker -- as far as I can tell, my box has all the "tabs" still in place:
Here is a pic of the box I bought, the arrow showing where the "tab" is gone. Almost all the "tabs" on the left side are gone:
Here is a pic of the 40amp double breaker -- the arrow shows that it has some sort of protrusion on the bottom of each side -- this protrusion prevents these breakers from fitting into the box unless the "tabs" are removed:
But here is a pic of a 50amp double breaker from the box I bought that does NOT have the protrusions:
So, my questions are:
Why does my box still have tabs while the other box is missing many?
Is there some major difference between the breakers with the protrusions and those without?
Is there some reason I cannot remove "tabs" from my breaker box?
I feel confident installing breakers but I do not like to take chances with electricity. My gut tells me it's probably just fine to remove a couple of tabs and plug in the breakers, but my head has alarm bells going off -- so I humbly request help from you experts out there. Everything else with the breaker box and the electrical system at our place is going fine, but I just want to provide my family with a stove.
Thank you for any responses!
Brad
